Report Shows Drone Strikes Based on Scant Evidence

New information on the Central Intelligence Agency’s campaign
of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan directly contradicts
the image the Barack Obama administration and the CIA have
sought to establish in the news media of a program based on
highly accurate targeting that is effective in disrupting al-Qaeda’s terrorist plots against the United States.

A new report on civilian casualties in the war in Pakistan
has revealed direct evidence that a house was targeted for a
drone attack merely because it had been visited by a group
of Taliban soldiers.

The report came shortly after publication of the results of
a survey of opinion within the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA) of Pakistan showing overwhelming popular
opposition to the drone strikes and majority support for
suicide attacks on U.S. forces under some circumstances.

Meanwhile, data on targeting of the drone strikes in
Pakistan indicate that they have now become primarily an
adjunct of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, targeting almost
entirely militant groups involved in the Afghan insurgency
rather than al-Qaeda officials involved in plotting global
terrorism.

The new report published by the Campaign for Innocent
Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) last week offers the first
glimpse of the drone strikes based on actual interviews with
civilian victims of the strikes.

In an interview with a researcher for CIVIC, a civilian
victim of a drone strike in North Waziristan carried out
during the Obama administration recounted how his home had
been visited by Taliban troops asking for lunch. He said he
had agreed out of fear of refusing them.

The very next day, he recalled, the house was destroyed by a
missile from a drone, killing his only son.

The CIVIC researcher, Christopher Rogers, investigated nine
of the 139 drone strikes carried out since the beginning of
2009 and found that a total of 30 civilians had been killed
in those strikes, including 14 women and children.

If that average rate of 3.33 civilian casualties for each
drone bombing is typical of all the strikes since the rules
for the strikes were loosened in early 2008, it would
suggest that roughly 460 civilians have been killed in the
drone campaign during that period.

The total number of deaths from the drone war in Pakistan
since early 2008 is unknown, but has been estimated by Peter
Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation
at between 1,109 and 1,734.

Only 66 leading officials in al-Qaeda or other anti-U.S.
groups have been killed in the bombings. Reports on the
bombings have listed the vast majority of the victims as
“militants,” without further explanation.

The victim’s account of a drone attack based on the
flimsiest rationale is consistent with the revelation in New
York Times reporter David Sanger’s book The Inheritance
that the CIA was given much greater freedom in early 2008 to
hit targets that might well involve killing innocent
civilians.

The original rationale of the drone campaign was to
“decapitate” al-Qaeda by targeting a list of high-ranking al-Qaeda officials. The rules of engagement required firm
evidence that there were no civilians at the location who
would be killed by the strike.

But in January 2008 the CIA persuaded President George W.
Bush to approve a set of “permissions” proposed by the CIA
that same month which allowed the agency to target locations
rather than identified al-Qaeda leaders if those locations
were linked to a “signature” – a pattern of behavior on the
part of al-Qaeda officials that had been observed over time.

That meant the CIA could now bomb a motorcade or a house if
it was believed to be linked to al-Qaeda, without
identifying any particular individual target.

A high-ranking Bush administration national security
official told Sanger that Bush later authorized even further
widening of the power of the CIA’s operations directorate to
make life-or-death decisions based on inferences rather than
hard evidence. The official acknowledged that giving the CIA
so much latitude was “risky,” because “you can make more
mistakes – you can hit the wrong house, or misidentify the
motorcade.”

The extraordinary power ceded to the CIA operations
directorate under the program provoked serious concerns in
the intelligence community, according to one former
intelligence official. It allowed that directorate to
collect the intelligence on potential targets in the FATA,
interpret its own intelligence and then make lethal
decisions based on that interpretation – all without any
outside check on the judgments it was making, even from
CIA’s own directorate of intelligence.

Officials from other intelligence agencies have sought
repeatedly to learn more about how the operations
directorate was making targeting decisions but were
rebuffed, according to the source.

Some national security officials, including mid-level
officials involved in the drone program itself, have
warned in the past that the drone strikes have increased
anti-Americanism and boosted recruitment for the Pakistani
Taliban and al-Qaeda. New support for that conclusion has
now come from the results of a survey of opinion on the
strikes in FATA published by the New America Foundation and
Terror Free Tomorrow.

The survey shows that 76 percent of the 1,000 FATA residents
surveyed oppose drone strikes and that nearly half of those
surveyed believe they kill mostly civilians.

Sixty percent of those surveyed believed that suicide
bombings against the U.S. military are “often or sometimes
justified.”

Meanwhile, data on the targeting of drone strikes make it
clear that the program, which the Obama administration and
the CIA have justified as effective in disrupting al-Qaeda
terrorism, is now focused on areas where Afghan and
Pakistani militants are engaged in the war in Afghanistan.

Most al-Qaeda leaders and Pakistani Taliban leader
Baitullah Mehsud, who has been closely allied with al-Qaeda
against the Pakistani government, have operated in South
Waziristan.

North Waziristan is where the Haqqani network provides safe
havens to Pashtun insurgents fighting U.S.-NATO troops in
Afghanistan. It is also where Hafiz Gul Bahadur, leader of a
Pakistani Taliban faction who has called for supporting the
Afghan insurgency rather than jihad against the Pakistani
government, operates.

In 2009, just over half the drone strikes were still carried
out in South Waziristan. But in 2010, 90 percent of the 86
drone strikes carried out thus far have been in North
Waziristan, according to data collected by Bill Roggio and
Alexander Mayer and published on the Web site Long War
Journal, which supports the drone campaign.

The dramatic shift in targeting came after al-Qaeda
officials were reported to have fled from South Waziristan
to Karachi and other major cities.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration was privately
acknowledging that the war would be a failure unless the
Pakistani military changed its policy of giving the Haqqani
network a safe haven in North Waziristan.

When asked whether the drone campaign was now primarily
about the war in Afghanistan rather than al-Qaeda terrorism,
Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation’s
Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative told IPS, “I think
that’s a reasonable conclusion.”

Bergen has defended the drone campaign in the past as “the
only game in town” in combating terrorism by al-Qaeda.